Field of Invention
The invention relates to methods and systems for generating in the interior of a medium or body radiant energy for producing a change in the properties of a medium or body by exposure to the radiation.
Discussion of the Background
Presently, light (i.e., electromagnetic radiation from the radio frequency through the visible to the x-ray and gamma ray wavelength range) activated processing is used in a number of industrial processes ranging from photoresist curing, to on-demand ozone production, to sterilization, to the promotion of polymer cross-linking activation (e.g. in adhesive and surface coatings) and others. Today, light activated processing is seen in these areas to have distinct advantages over more conventional approaches. For example, conventional sterilization by steam autoclaving or in food processing by pasteurization may unsuitably overheat the medium to be sterilized. As such, light activated curable coatings are one of the fastest growing sectors in the coatings industry. In recent years, this technology has made inroads into a number of market segments like fiber optics, optical and pressure-sensitive adhesives, and automotive applications like cured topcoats, and curable powder coatings. The driving force of this development is mostly the quest for an increase in productivity of the coating and curing process, as conventional non light activated adhesive and surface coatings typically require 1) the elimination of solvents from the adhesive and surface coatings to produce a cure and 2) a time/temperature cure which adds delay and costs to the manufacturing process.
Moreover, the use of solvent based products in adhesive and surface coatings applications is becoming increasingly unattractive because of rising energy costs and stringent regulation of solvent emissions into the atmosphere. Optimum energy savings as well as beneficial ecological considerations are both served by radiation curable adhesive and surface coating compositions. Radiation curable polymer cross-linking systems have been developed to eliminate the need for high oven temperatures and to eliminate the need for expensive solvent recovery systems. In those systems, light irradiation initiates free-radical cross-linking in the presence of common photosensitizers.
However, in the adhesive and surface coating applications and in many of the other applications listed above, the light-activated processing is limited due to the penetration depth of light into the processed medium. For example, in water sterilization, ultraviolet light sources are coupled with agitation and stirring mechanisms in order to ensure that any bacteria in the water medium will be exposed to the UV light. In light-activated adhesive and surface coating processing, the primary limitation is that the material to be cured must be directly exposed to the light, both in type (wavelength or spectral distribution) and intensity. In adhesive and surface coating applications, any “shaded” area will require a secondary cure mechanism, increasing cure time over the non-shaded areas and further delaying cure time due to the existent of a sealed skin through which subsequent curing must proceed (i.e., referred to as a cocoon effect).
As described in incorporated by reference Ser. No. 11/935,655, it is well recognized that a major problem associated with the existing methods of diagnosis and treatment of cell proliferation disorders is in differentiation of normal cells from target cells. Such target specificity is difficult to achieve by way of surgery since the strategy there is simply to cut out a large enough portion of the affected area to include all diseased cells and hope that no diseased cells have spread to other distant locations.
With chemotherapy, while some degree of differentiation can be achieved, healthy cells are generally adversely affected by chemo-agents. As in surgery, the treatment strategy in chemotherapy is also to kill off a large population of cells, with the understanding that there are far more normal cells than diseased cells so that the organism can recover from the chemical assault.
Radiation therapy works by irradiating cells with high levels of high energy radiation such as high energy photon, electron, or proton. These high energy beams ionize the atoms which make up a DNA chain, which in turn leads to cell death. Unlike surgery, radiation therapy does not require placing patients under anesthesia and has the ability to treat tumors deep inside the body with minimal invasion of the body. However, the high doses of radiation needed for such therapies damages healthy cells just as effectively as it does diseased cells. Thus, similar to surgery, differentiation between healthy and diseased cells in radiation therapy is only by way of location. There is no intrinsic means for a radiation beam to differentiate between a healthy cell from a diseased cell either.
Other methods may be more refined. For example, one form of advanced treatment for lymphoma known as extracorporeal photophoresis involves drawing the patient's blood from his body into an instrument where the white cells (buffy coat) are separated from the plasma and the red blood cells. A small amount of the plasma separated in this process is then isolated and mixed with a photosensitizer (PS), a drug that can be activated by light. The buffy coat is then exposed to a light to activate the drug. The treated blood is then returned to the patient. In this example, one may think of the target-specificity problem as being solved by separating the blood from the rest of the body where the target components are easily exposed.
However, this procedure has its drawbacks; it requires drawing blood from the patient, thus requiring cumbersome machinery to perform and may require blood transfusion in order to maintain the volume of blood flow in the machine. Further, this also limits the size of the patient that can be treated, since the extracorporeal volume is great and too much withdrawal of blood increases the risk of hypovolemic shock. The method is also limited to treating blood-born cell proliferation related disorders such as lymphoma, and is not capable of treating solid tumors or other types of non-blood related cell proliferation disorders.
A problem encountered in PDT therapy is the inability to treat target areas that are more than a few centimeters beneath the surface of the skin without significant invasive techniques, and the fact that PDT typically operates by generation of sufficient quantities of singlet oxygen to cause cell lysis. However, singlet oxygen in sufficient concentration will lyse not only target cells, but also healthy cells rather indiscriminately.
Therefore, there still exists a need for better and more effective treatments that can more precisely target the diseased cells without causing substantial side-effects or collateral damages to healthy tissues, and which are capable of treating even solid tumors or other types of non-blood related cell proliferation disorders.